“A free-improvisation prayer and scream for survival and freedom, for those who want to be part of the Earth and the Universe, more than associating with a nationality, outside any political constraint.”
–G.C.

Free streaming and $5 download.

Also out today: the newly revised, remixed and mastered version of Christian + Mehata’s La Géographie sans Regret (SpecT 15; orig. 2012). More bass, more sonic expansion, and ultimately a better sounding version of a blistering experimental album that had already earned high praise from critics, including The Sound Projector.http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2014/02/15/people-in-the-ceiling/

The new video by AXIAL for Terra-a-Terra, a haunting collaboration from Paulo Chagas (Portugal), George Christian (Brazil) and Mehata Hiroshi (Japan). This is excerpted from a stunning thirty-one minute ambient/noise/improvisation piece that serves as one of two tracks on Love Without Wings, a new title on Spectropol that will be released alongside the newly revised, remixed and mastered version of Christian + Mehata’s La Géographie sans Regret on March 1. [More details on these releases in the coming weeks.]

This is the unedited outcome of the impromptu meeting of Tetuzi Akiyama on acoustic guitar and Johan Arrias on alto saxophone, on a Sunday morning in a minuscule Stockholm living room. Having toured and recorded together years before in a quartet format with the formidable Gul 3, the musicians knew each other well, but this was their first duo session.No preset parameters here. After a glass of black coffee and slightly diverging words on the structure ­- one long piece or shorter ones? ­- Johan shoves a plastic bottle down the bell of his alto, Tetuzi strokes a string, and they’re off. No distinct melodies or rhythms, yet the music flows with a gentle insistency and retains a strong sense of direction and purpose throughout, its beauty heightened by moments of dissonance. At times reminiscent of a koto-­shakuhachi dialogue, the core feeling is one of deep trust and respect. Every note, every sound counts. In the room, in the moment. Slow breathing, just as Tetuzi had suggested.

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Tetuzi Akiyama plays the guitar with primitive and practical implications, by adding a desire of own to the instrument’s characteristic nature in minimal and straight method. He delicately and sometime boldly controls the volume of the sound from micro to macro level, and tries to quantize his physical system.

Besides making variety of solo albums which covers from fingerpicking and slide acoustic guitar atonalism to noisy experimental drone to never ending boogie, he have made many albums in collaboration with highly praised artists such as Jozef Van Wissem, Donald McPherson, Greg Malcolm, Bruce Russell, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn, Michel Henritzi, Phantom Limb, Gul3, Tim Barnes, Oren Ambarchi, Martin Ng, Anla Courtis and Alan Licht, just to name a few. He is also a band member of Koboku Senjû, Satanic Abandoned Rock & Roll Society and Hontatedori.

Akiyama is a frequent guest at international music festivals in East & West Europe, North & South America, Australia and New Zealand in recent years.

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Johan Arrias is a saxophone and clarinet player active in the field of improvised, experimental and contemporary music. He works with deconstructing and fragmenting the traditional play on his instrument with extended techniques and preparation, regarding sound as an autonomous matter. This has led him to also start working with sound art. When composing music he moves freely from traditional to graphic notation and concepts.

You may be excited to hear that a new edition of this album…remastered and with added bass…is coming out next month alongside a wonderful new collaboration from Christian (Brazil) and Mehata (Japan) with the great Paulo Chagas (Portugal).

Tetuzi Akiyama & Jeff Gburek’s new album of engrossing improvisations is available for streaming and purchase in download and limited edition CDR formats. Check it out below and see the bandcamp page for more details.

These recorded improvisations from 2010 are a portrait of an evolving musical relationship between two well-traveled avant musicians. Quiet guitars and electronics interact over a bed of silence, an intimate post-Feldman environment where breathing and room sound permeate the texture. The east/west hybrid interests of both players seem to inform the subtle harmonic framework and the hypnotic flow of events. Jeff Gburek (Poland) recalls that between recorded segments the duo discussed moods/imagery, undetermined but subliminal suggestions. “In the middle of nowhere, the desert…” was an idea for the second track, which sparked Gburek’s “strong associative imagination with the New Mexico desert landscape and my sounds; because much of my sound vocabulary for that instrument set-up was developed while I was living in New Mexico.” Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan) had also been visiting New Mexico a few months before the recording, his slide guitar on that track perhaps redolent of the southwestern US. Overall these four tracks invite the listener into a unified and compelling experience, a meeting of musical presences enabled by patience and a willingness to explore.

The haunting new collaboration from two emerging artists from Brazil and Japan. Sheets of noisy harmony, shimmering textures, microtonal explorations, and voice drenched in reverb seep in and out of existence. Somewhere between avant/noise rock and experimental electronic, this recording is a strange trip that gets better with each hearing.

more from artist Wilhelm Matthies:

La Géographie sans Regret (George Christian & Mehata Sentimental Legend) is about exploring emotional grounds, exhilarating here, melancholy there, dark and tortured there, but without regret. Each musical piece seems to have originated from an emotional reality which is expressed in written words and transformed with the same intensity and emotional and moral ambiguity into musical language.

As a collaboration, George Christian was able to go beyond language barriers which could trap him into such territories, and was able to communicate it to Mehata Hiroshi. Mehata Hiroshi was able to match it both musically and with his visual artwork. His visual artworks, likewise, have the depth, sparkle, horror, and exhilaration expressed in the music they made.

Two young artists show us what it is like to be young, risk taking, treading on water, mud, solid ground sometimes, but throughout it all, without regret.